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unidentified
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Several bills related to Amtrak. | |
| Live coverage when members return here on C-SPAN. | ||
| Tuesday, President-elect Trump's Defense Department nominee, Pete Hegseth, will appear at a confirmation hearing. | ||
| The former Fox News host previously served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of the Minnesota National Guard and worked for a veterans advocacy group. | ||
| He also earned a master's degree in public policy from a JFK school at Harvard University. | ||
| From the Senate Armed Services Committee, you can watch live Tuesday at 9.30 a.m. Eastern on C-SPAN 3, C-SPAN now, our free mobile app, or online at c-span.org. | ||
| C-SPAN, Democracy Unfiltered. | ||
| We're funded by these television companies and more, including MIDCO. | ||
| where are you going or maybe a better question is how far do you want to go and how fast do you want to get there now we're getting somewhere So let's go. | ||
| Let's go faster. | ||
| Let's go further. | ||
| Let's go beyond. | ||
| MIDCO supports C-SPAN as a public service, along with these other television providers, giving you a front-row seat to democracy. | ||
| We'd like to take a look at the week ahead in Washington to do that. | ||
| This week, we're joined by Andrew Desiderio, the senior congressional reporter at Punch Bowl News, and Andrew Desiderio. | ||
| It's 14 confirmation hearings this week, 13 nominees, 11 committees holding hearings. | ||
| What is a senior congressional reporter to do? | ||
| How do you focus your efforts? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, you've got to prioritize, right? | |
| In terms of the nominees that are the most controversial, that are going to have the most difficult time getting confirmed. | ||
| You've got Pete Hegseth, first thing tomorrow morning before the Senate Armed Services Committee. | ||
| He, of course, is President Trump's nominee to be Defense Secretary. | ||
| His nomination, I think, is going to be the most important one to focus on this week. | ||
| But there are a couple of others who actually don't even have confirmation hearings this week that are on the national security side. | ||
| So Republicans we know want to prioritize the national security nominees who will not have their confirmation hearings this week and in fact will be continuing to meet with senators. | ||
| So there's going to be a lot of action both in those committee rooms and outside of those committee rooms. | ||
| I would say those other two that don't have hearings this week that are going to be controversial are of course Tulsi Gabbard, the nominee for director of national intelligence and Kash Patel, the nominee for FBI director. | ||
| In Kash Patel's case, he probably will not get a confirmation hearing until February at the earliest. | ||
| In the case of Tulsi Gabbard, she could get a confirmation hearing as soon as next week, but the Intelligence Committee has not yet noticed that hearing. | ||
| What is the strategy for having 14 hearings in three days? | ||
| Is there a strategy here of doing that with Republicans and control of the Senate, obviously, and Donald Trump coming in and these being his nominees, of course? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, I mean, look, this is what they try to do every four years, especially when a new president comes into office, right? | |
| They try to stack these as closely to the inauguration date as they can. | ||
| Of course, the Senate cannot vote to confirm any of these nominees on the floor until the new president is inaugurated. | ||
| So the question becomes, who is a candidate for day one confirmation? | ||
| That would require, obviously, someone who's going to get every Republican, every Republican senator's vote, and also a substantial number of Democratic votes. | ||
| And the only one I see who could be a candidate for that right now is Marco Rubio, the president's nominee for Secretary of State. | ||
| He has his nominee before the confirmation hearing, excuse me, before the Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday of this week. | ||
| So he is, I think, the likeliest to get confirmed on Inauguration Day. | ||
| It would be obviously the afternoon of January 20th. | ||
| Four years ago, when President Biden first came into office, the nominee that he had confirmed on Inauguration Day was Avril Haynes, the Director of National Intelligence. | ||
| A couple days later, he had Lloyd Austin, the Defense Secretary, confirmed. | ||
| And then a few days after that, he had Anthony Blinken, the Secretary of State, of course, confirmed. | ||
| It is normal to prioritize national security nominees on the floor if you're Senate leadership. | ||
| In the case of Trump's crop of cabinet nominees, they are some of the more controversial ones, aside from Marco Rubio, of course. | ||
| So you could very well see a day one confirmation. | ||
| After that, it'll be up to Senate Democrats in terms of whether they will yield time or not, because under the Senate rules, each nominee, under regular order, if you use the full time, each nominee would take up a few days of floor time. | ||
| Out of curiosity, does Marco Rubio get to vote on his own nomination? | ||
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unidentified
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He can as long as he is still a sitting senator by the time the vote happens. | |
| He could technically wait to resign until right before he becomes Secretary of State, of course. | ||
| So that could be interesting. | ||
| I've tried asking him about this to see what his plans are. | ||
| He doesn't have any specifics to share yet, but that could very well be fascinating. | ||
| I will say he does not need his own vote. | ||
| He's going to get 80, 85 plus votes probably in the Senate. | ||
| In general, what senators stick out come confirmation time? | ||
| Who are the senators that really tend to make a splash during these confirmation hearings? | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah, look, during the hearings, obviously it's dependent on who sits on what committees. | |
| On the floor, it's a lot different because you have the sort of perpetual swing votes. | ||
| Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, I would put Mitch McConnell in that category now that he's not in leadership anymore. | ||
| Mitch McConnell has a singular focus for the remaining two years in his Senate term, which is to continue to advance his national security doctrine, his foreign policy doctrine, how he sees the world. | ||
| And that involves, of course, pushing back against what he sees as a more isolationist streak popping up in his party. | ||
| And one of the ways he is thinking about doing that is on these nominations, right? | ||
| So, you know, you have to really consider, is Mitch McConnell going to vote for someone like Tulsi Gabbard? | ||
| Is he going to vote for someone like Pete Hegseth? | ||
| I think a lot of it depends on what they say during their confirmation hearings and how they lay out their case. | ||
| But I would say just in terms of who to watch on the Senate floor, I think those three, Collins, Murkowski, McConnell, beyond that, I think it's nominee dependent because some senators, as we know, do have their pet issues they like to focus on when it comes to certain subject matter areas that cabinet nominees could have jurisdiction over. | ||
| So again, it's nominee dependent, but I would say those three are the ones to focus on. | ||
| C-SPAN callers also have their issues they like to focus on when they call in, inviting viewers to call in during this segment. |